How To: Assess a Business Simulations/Serious Game Training Program

Hello SimDevGroup Community-

This article will share some common practices we see in training and development assessment when using a Business Simulation and/or Serious Game. This how to is not rocket science, and will not require any statistics to complete. This is a common sense guide and/or suggestions from what we've seen succeed in the past.

How-To: Business Simulations and Serious Game Program Assessment

Step 1: Write down the 3 learning objectives from your training and development program(s).

Step 2: Before participants engage in the business simulation or serious game, give them a set of 5-10 questions that measure their knowledge of the learning objectives. For example, if you are trying to teach them how to read and income statement, provide and income statement and ask 5 questions about it. This is now your baseline for comparison.

Step 3: Run the participants through your training program which includes either the business simulation or serious game. Just run the training and development program as you normally would.

Step 4: As part of the ending exercise, have the participants complete the same set of questions from step 2. This will act as your variable to compare to the baseline.

Step 5: Compare the scores. You should see an increase. If you want to get fancy, enter the scores into Excel (or SPSS) and run a statistical significance test. This is especially useful for training program sustainability.

We told you, this is designed to be a fundamental How-To Measure Success in a Business Simulation and/or Serious Game within your corporate training and development program. We know this is common sense, but usually its best to use the basics.

We hope this helps and Happy Valentines Day! (smooch!)